Installing onto an EXISTING WordPress Website

I’m interested in giving our members at http://www.rockstartriathlete.com more social networking capability, but want the installed Buddypress to stay true to our current theme. So when I install Buddypress, should I install it into a new directory or into the existing directory? Will it automatically integrate with our current theme, or do I need to hire a developer to make it look right? Has anyone “added” Buddypress to an existed WordPress site to add a social networking component to that site, without losing the already existing site content?

Reading your post, I think the answer is “hire a theme developer to make it look right.”

First of all, you need to get a test server (even if it’s locally on your machine) setup with a base WordPress install with your theme and then install BuddyPress and then this.

There will be changes which you’ll need to adapt to, but the above-linked BP Template Pack plugin should get you started (or at least let you assess whether the changes are something you can do or whether it’s something you need to hire a developer for).